Don’t listen to those New Atheists, says this Vatican astronomer. You shouldn’t have to choose between science and faith.

Last fall, I confess, I was in the habit of looking into every bookstore I came across for the bright yellow cover of my latest book, God’s Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion (Jossey-Bass). In every store I would find a large stack of books with a familiar yellow dust jacket sitting in the religion section. Unfortunately those yellow books were not mine but copies of Christopher Hitchens’ anti-religion screed, God Is Not Great (Twelve Books). Yellow was a popular color in the publishing business last fall, I guess.

Along with the color yellow, books bashing religion in the name of science have become quite fashionable of late. These include, among others, recent works from the biologist Richard Dawkins, the cognitive scientist/philosopher Daniel Dennett, and the neuroscientist Sam Harris. Collectively these authors have been dubbed the “New Atheists.”

Others better equipped than I have pointed out the shortcomings of the New Atheists. Typical is Jim Holt’s quietly devastating review of Dawkins’ book The God Delusion in The New York Times Sunday Book Review (Oct. 22, 2006). Though himself sympathetic to much in Dawkins’ stance, Holt notes, “Dawkins’ failure to appreciate just how hard philosophical questions about religion can be makes reading [his book] an intellectually frustrating experience.” Meanwhile, Stephen Prothero concludes his review in The Washington Post (May 6, 2007) of Hitchens’ book by sighing, “I have never encountered a book whose author is so fundamentally unacquainted with its subject.” It appears that these “evangelical atheists” know as little about religion as the religious fundamentalists know about science.

Indeed, none of the New Atheist books carry the panache of John William Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) or Andrew Dixon White’s A History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom (1896). Those Victorian-era bestsellers, enamored with the inevitable triumph of progress over superstition, provided colorful (if completely invented) snapshots of history, such as Columbus heroically battling a church full of flat-earthers to prove that the world was round. By contrast, our New Atheists are reduced to a more mundane recitation of the evils done by various people in the name of religion, and the curious logic that, assuming science and religion are in conflict, the fact that science is true must imply that religion is not.

Besides its dust jacket color, Hitchens’ work has another thing in common with my own effort: Neither book is likely to change the mind of anyone who’s already camped out on the other side. I don’t much fear that the New Atheists pose a serious challenge to a believer’s faith in religion. Most believers simply won’t bother reading them.

What I do fear, though, is the disastrous effect that this “scientific” atheism has on a believer’s appreciation of science. The typical churchgoer may not know much about science, but they do know their church. If they are told they must choose between science and religion, they’ll choose religion every time, even if it means rejecting science. Rather than undermining religion, the New Atheists are reinforcing antiscience prejudices in the general public. They’re undermining science.

But the atheistic scientists portrayed in these books are about as representative as the stereotyped fundamentalist preachers they cite. People like them do exist, but they are hardly the norm.

Indeed, when I was researching the religious behavior of scientists and engineers (the “mechanics” in the title of my book), I found that the world of science is not nearly as alienated from religion as the New Atheists would have you believe. My very role at the Vatican as one of the papal astronomers should suggest that the Catholic Church is no enemy to science per se.

But perhaps most importantly, the image of science and religion as two camps at war is a gross oversimplification of the issues at stake, and of those of us who deal with those issues in our own personal lives. The barriers between science and religion, belief and doubt, faith and reason are not nearly as black and white as the pundits would have you believe.

I was an active scientist for 15 years before I took vows as a Jesuit brother. When I returned to science as a Jesuit, I was apprehensive of the reaction I would get from my fellow scientists. What actually happened was what I least expected: Time after time, colleagues whom I had known for years would come up to me and say, “You’re a Jesuit? Wonderful! Let me tell you about the church I belong to.”

We had all thought we were the only believers in the bunch. But once I had declared myself publicly as a churchgoer-scientist, the rest of my friends felt comfortable talking about their own religious lives. I came to realize that the proportion of scientists and engineers who were churchgoers pretty much mirrors the society in which we live. In Britain, where churchgoing is rare, perhaps 10 percent of the scientists of my acquaintance are religious; in Chicago maybe half the scientists I know belong to a church.

In the two months I spent interviewing scientists and engineers in Silicon Valley for God’s Mechanics, I encountered representatives of nearly every religion you could imagine. Mind you, their take on religion was often colored by their peculiar “techie” slant on the world. The questions they asked, and the sorts of answers they were looking for, were often far more pragmatic and functional than philosophical or overtly spiritual. And yet, in their own way, they experienced a deep connection to God, especially God as Creator, whose creation they encountered so intimately in the lab.

Many famous scientists throughout history have been churchgoers. James Clerk Maxwell, whose equations described the nature of radio waves and light, was a devoted Anglican; astronomers Angelo Secchi, who first classified stars by their spectra, and Georges Lemaître, who came up with the Big Bang theory, were both Catholic priests. Bernard Lovell, the man who built the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in England, is a Methodist; Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin brought with him to the moon the Communion bread and wine from his Presbyterian church. (Catholic astronauts on the Space Shuttle, such as the current director of NASA’s Stennis Space Center, Robert Cabana, have also brought Communion with them into space.)

And of course the very foundations of science rest on the work of medieval clerics like Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, and Nicholas Oresme. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton all thought of themselves as deeply religious. A significant number of scientists publishing in 18th-century journals identified themselves as “Reverend”; back then, clergymen were among the few people who had the education and the free time to do all the collecting and sorting of data that is the backbone of scientific research. (We still call it “clerical” work.)

This isn’t offered up as a proof that religion must be right because it’s been endorsed by famous scientists. It’s just a simple refutation of the canard that you have to be an atheist to be a scientist.

Even the atheists whom I met during my interviews were sympathetic to my religious calling. They were surprised, of course, that I could be employed by the Vatican to do research into the origins of the solar system. Given how the media distorts science and religion, they had assumed that all Christians must be creationists. But does the following statement sound like it comes from someone who insists on a creationist’s interpretation of Genesis?

“Ten billion years ago, the matter of all the spiral nebulae was compressed into a relatively narrow space, at the time of the beginning of the cosmic processes . . . the average age of the most ancient minerals [on Earth] is indicated at a maximum of 5 billion years. . . . Although these figures are astonishing, nevertheless, even the simplest believer would not take them as unheard of and differing from those derived from the first words of Genesis, ‘In the beginning.’ ”